


Welcome Christmas, Bring Your Light

by dollylux



Series: Fic Advent Calendar 2014: Brothers, Soulmates, and Other Such Sexiness [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Parade, Cuddling & Snuggling, Desperate Shouting from a Christmas Float, Domestic Weecest, Gift Exchange, M/M, Panic Attacks, Panicking Dean, Schmoop, Underage Kissing, Weecest, crowds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean loses Sam during a Christmas parade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome Christmas, Bring Your Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Niightmoves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niightmoves/gifts).



> Day seven of my fic advent calendar. Prompt: crowds.
> 
> Yeaaah, I've really gotta stop writing fluff. :P

“Meet me back here at 6:15, okay?” Dean frowns, reaching out to tug on Sam’s coat, pulling it closed a little better. Sam takes a step back and reaches up to fumble with the coat himself, buttoning up the last button and giving a world-weary sigh. Everything has made Sam sigh since he turned thirteen and hasn’t let up in two years.

“ _Okay_ , Dean.”

Dean squints at him, tipping his head to the side and studying his little brother, the whole thing apparently making Sam nervous because he shuffles in place and gives another one of those big sighs.

“So, where are you goin’ again?” Dean folds his arms over his chest and tries to look tall (which isn’t that hard next to Sam).

“I _told_ you, it’s a secret! Just lemme go, Dean. Please?” Sam’s hair is too long again, is shaggy and hanging in his eyes, and Dean has to shove his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching out and touching it.

“Alright,” he finally sighs, glancing around before he meets Sam’s eyes again, raising his eyebrows at him with a little smile. “Gimme a kiss.”

Sam can’t hide his grin that well, but he tries. He ducks his head, thick falls of hair in his eyes before he’s shaking them away with a flick of his head and meeting Dean’s eyes again.

“Pervert,” Sam accuses as he steps closer, lifting up on his tiptoes to press a quick but warm kiss to Dean’s mouth. Dean hums in agreement, smiling when Sam lowers back down to the snow-slushed street. His own smirk is deadly.

“Cause I like kissing you in public? Yeah, maybe. Go on. Six-fifteen, you hear me?”

Sam pushes up, all warm and small and soft-bodied, and presses a kiss to the cold apple of Dean’s cheek before he’s off, shuffling down the street with that shy, unassuming gait he has now. Dean watches him go until he can’t see him anymore, and then he’s sighing himself.

He licks his lips to gather the rest of the taste of his little brother’s mouth, savoring it quietly on the fairly crowded street. He turns and heads in the opposite direction, toward the bookstore that Sam has fallen in love with during their short stay here Allentown. If Sam is gonna go sneaky-buy Dean Christmas presents, Dean’s definitely going to do the same.

He spends an hour walking around the bookstore, reading the backs of about fifty different books, flipping through pages and reading a few before putting most of them back. He heads to the front of the store with _Candide_ by Voltaire and _A People’s History of the United States_ clutched to his chest, his face a little flushed with the thought of Sam maybe enjoying these books. That maybe Dean did a good job in picking them out for him, in knowing his baby brother.

He puts the books down on the counter just as the front door of the shop opens, a sharp cut of freezing air sliding in along with the sounds of large shifts of people walking by, the sound filling the shop. Dean raises his eyebrows, turning to the woman ringing him up.

“What’s goin’ on out there? Did they finally put a Starbucks in or something?”

The woman narrows her eyes at him, smirking and holding her hand out for his money. He hands her a couple of twenties that he earned in a card game last week outside of Trenton and waits for her answer.

“Have you been living under a rock? It’s the Allentown Holiday Spectacular Parade. Thousands of people and like, thirty floats and all the local chorus groups and the Future Farmers of--”

“When does it start?” Dean interrupts, hand out for his change.

She passes him his change and glances down at her watch. “Right now.”

He blinks at her. “Thousands of people.”

“Yep!” She shoves his books into a bag and gives him a big grin. “Merry Christmas!”

“Merry fuckin’...” he mumbles to himself as he walks away, heading for the door with growing dread that overflows into icy-cold fear when he finally opens it and steps outside.

She was right. There are literally hundreds of people out here on the main drag, completely clogging the street and the sidewalks. His stomach flips nervously, the hand holding onto the plastic handle of the bag tightening, nails digging into his palm. He grits his teeth, staunchly ignoring his irrational, overwhelming fear of crowds and pushing into the throng to head back to the place he’d left Sam.

The snow isn’t deterring them in the slightest, doesn’t dampen any of their creepily cheerful smiles that Dean does his best to glare in the face of when they turn on him. He hears the parade start up just as he gets back to the front of the hardware store where they’d parted. 

Sam’s not here.

Dean pushes his jacket sleeve up and blinks at his watch.

6:21. He’s late.

Fear creeps up his throat, bile rising with it as he lifts up onto the tips of his toes to try and see over the heads of all the people, looking for a mop of brown hair and rosy cheeks and that face he loves so fucking much.

Nothing. 

No Sam.

“Don’t panic, you jackass,” he whispers to himself, his voice coming out in rushed little pants. “Just fucking find him.”

He charges forward maybe a bit too zealously and crashes straight into a family, almost knocking over a little boy clutching a Spongebob Squarepants wearing a Santa hat. Dean grabs the kid by the shoulder and rights him again, giving a quick nod to the father who is glaring at Dean, mouth opened to probably chew him out.

“Sorry ‘bout that, excuse me.” He ducks past them, shouldering grannies out of the way and continuing on. The parade is getting closer, bands playing loudly, all brass and drums and jingly bells, and the crowd just gets thicker and thicker the further away from their meeting spot he gets.

A float finally comes into view over the heads of the people at the edge of the sidewalk, one carrying a giant, scary-ass nutcracker and some little girls in white ballerina get-up, dancing around awkwardly wearing fairy wings. The crowd cheers and claps, drowning out the tinny sugar plum fairy music coming from the crappy speakers on the float. There’s a shift then, the crowd acting with one mind and pushing toward the street and the float, and Dean drifts with it, trapped and helpless against so many people who don’t seem to give a shit that they’re being really kind of cult-like about a fucking Christmas parade.

“Excuse me,” he mumbles, chest rising and falling in fast, panicked gasps, hands trembling when they reach up to nudge people out of the way. He tries his best to get out, to weave his way through to some kind of safe zone, but he only finds more and more people, a seemingly unending crowd and a parade that just keeps coming, getting louder and louder.

He plasters himself against the side of a building finally, still getting jostled but the relief of touching something solid, unmoving, is huge. He closes his eyes and tries to calm down, to shove away this embarrassing panic attack over a fucking _Christmas parade_ before Sam sees him.

It’s getting darker and darker as the minutes tick by, the twinkly lights on the floats glittering cheerfully in the dusk as the snow falls. Dean takes a deep breath and steels himself before he pushes away from the brick and back into the throng, squinting into the dying light for Sam.

What if something’s happened to him? What if Dad was wrong and Allentown isn’t a safe place for them to hide out while he works on a case in Pittsburgh? What if something has Sam and Dean can’t get to him, can’t even fucking see him, can’t save him if he needs saving?

“Sammy!” It bursts out of him shamefully, his voice trembling, both hands clutching the little bag now. “Sammy!”

People are looking at him, eyeing him as he jostles past, wondering at the strange boy in the leather jacket who seems to have tears in his fearful eyes, who is yelling out for someone in a crowd of thousands, his voice drowned out immediately by joyful Christmas songs.

He’s two blocks from where they’d agreed to meet now, dark settling in, all the decorative light displays on the streetlights coming on: wreaths and reindeer and Santas. A group of children are singing “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer” now, their disorganized, shrill voices setting Dean’s teeth on edge.

He feels like he’s in a nightmare.

The flashiest float he’s seen so far comes crawling by, loaded down with a giant, cartoony tree and a weird green creature and a group of other weird people holding hands and singing a familiar song.

The Grinch, Dean realizes. Sam used to love that movie.

He’s pushing his way toward the float before he lets himself think about this too much, ignoring the annoyed calls of people after him. He steps right out onto the street and right up to the float, looking it over for a point of entry. He finds a small set of stairs near the front and marches over to them, setting his jaw, gathering his courage, and climbing up onto the goddamn float.

“Hey! Hey, what are you--”

“Sammy!” Dean cups his hands around his mouth and yells as loud as he can, searching through all the faces staring at him in blank confusion in the crowd for one particular face, his favorite face in the world. “SAMMY.”

“Excuse me, sir. You can’t be on this float.” It’s a Who, a dude-Who and he’s wrapping one of his weird hands around Dean’s arm and tugging him gently toward the stairs again, trying to get him off of the float without causing too much more of a scene.

“Let me go, asshole. I’m looking for my brother!” He jerks his arm away from the Who and starts toward the little platform that the tree is on and hopping up before anybody can stop him, his voice shrill, panicked now but he raises it up so loud and high that it cracks. “SAMMY! SAMMY, WHERE ARE YOU?”

“Young man! Get down from there! Get down here right now!” Two cops walking along quickly beside the float, their faces fat and red with cold, their barely-contained fury directed right at Dean. Apparently you don’t fuck with the Allentown Holiday Spectacular Parade.

Dean runs around to the opposite side of the tree, searching over the other side of the street, looking at every single face he can as fast as he can. He can feel the float shaking as the cops climbing onboard.

“SAMMY, I’M UP HERE! ON THE GRINCH FLOAT.” It’s mortifying, completely, horribly, irreversibly embarrassing that he’s up here in the middle of some kind of panicked breakdown in front of all of these people, but he doesn’t care right now. He just wants his brother and he wants to _leave_ , to get back to the shitty house they’re renting and throw some wood on the fire and curl up around Sam and not let him up until dawn.

“Get your ass down here, you little bastard.” Gloved, strong hands on his arms, four of them, and they yank him so hard he has no choice but to follow. He keeps a deathgrip on the bag of books while he’s dragged off his feet and off the float, thrown without ceremony off of it, right at the feet of the kids standing at the very edge of the sidewalk and right into the path of a bunch of people on horses. 

Shit.

“Dean!”

Another set of hands on him but these are smaller, gentler, and Dean scrambles to help them as they both work to peel him off the road before he gets trampled by festively dressed horses.

Sam maneuvers his way through the crowd, dragging Dean with him by a tight grip on his hand and Dean just lets him, relief of every single kind coursing through his body so suddenly that he feels boneless and stupidly emotional. 

He hears a tiny bell overhead and he’s suddenly surrounded by warmth and the smell of coffee, and Sam is helping Dean sink down on an old couch. He finally comes back into himself a little, enough to notice that they’re in a café, one that is all but deserted because it’s not a Christmas float. Sam is standing over him, searching his face worriedly, frozen hands on Dean’s cheeks.

“Dean, are you okay?”

Dean closes his eyes, his cheeks flushing with shame under Sam’s palms, but he nods.

“I just… I couldn’t find you and it freaked me out. Where were you?”

Sam lowers his eyes and looks sheepish, thumbs stroking absently over Dean’s cheeks. “I lost track of time. And it was so crazy when I finally left the store, and you weren’t there. And then.”

Sam lifts his eyes to meet Dean’s, his smile cutting deep dimples into his rosy cheeks. “Then I saw you up there. On the float.”

Dean closes his eyes with a groan. “Oh, Jesus.”

Sam gives a laugh, leaning down over Dean, surrounding Dean in his inherent warmth and sweet smell and just overall goodness and kissing the center of his forehead, his lips soft and still smiling.

“I’m gonna go get us some coffee. Just stay here, okay?”

“Hey, hold on.” Dean reaches out for Sam, snagging a belt loop before he gets too far and tugging him back. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet, passing it over to Sam and then releasing him again.

He relaxes back against the couch while Sam’s gone, still honestly needing a little time just to calm the fuck down, to ease the last bit of panic out of his body, to let his mind stop racing. Sam is back like magic with two mugs of something, and Dean takes one of them and sniffs at it suspiciously.

“It’s a cinnamon bun mocha.” Sam reaches over to tuck Dean’s wallet into his jacket pocket before curling up on the couch at his side, sliding right under Dean’s arm and sipping at his own coffee.

“What kinda frou-frou shit,” Dean mutters against the rim of the cup before he takes a careful drink, his tastebuds singing with delight at all of the sugary, Christmasy flavors sliding over his tongue. He swallows, keeps his poker face.

“It’s okay, I guess,” he finally says, taking another drink and setting it down on the coffee table.

“Wanna exchange gifts now?” Sam turns to face him after he puts down his own coffee, tucking his legs up against Dean’s thigh and leaning back against the arm of the couch. He’s got a little bag in his hands that he’s running his fingers over fitfully, his eyes bright and hopeful as he watches Dean, waits for an answer.

“But… I didn’t get to wrap ‘em or anything,” Dean whines, glancing over at the wrinkled, stretched-out bag on the coffee table next to his coffee. Sam leans forward, stretching his ever-growing body and pressing a kiss to Dean’s cheek.

“I don’t care, Dean. Promise.”

“Fine,” he sighs, smiling a little as he reaches for the bag and hands it over to Sam, trying to keep his nervousness under lock and key. Sam slides the small bag into his hand, their fingers touching for the briefest of moments. Dean turns to face Sam on the couch now, one of Sam’s legs draped over his thigh. It’s just what they do, who they are. And Dean doesn’t really give a shit if the bored kid behind the counter thinks they’re gross or queers or whatever. Maybe they’re both, and fuck him.

“Open it?” Sam is practically squirming on the couch, and Dean lifts his eyes to watch him for a long moment before he fishes the tiny box out of the bag, giving it a shake and hearing something rattle in it. Sam sighs, exasperated. “Dean, just open it!”

“Hafta shake it, Sammy. It’s just what you do.” He pries the lid off the box and stares down at the band of silver there resting against the cotton. He blinks at it for a long moment, tongue out to wet his lips before he looks up at his little brother. “Is this… are you proposing to me?”

“Dean!” Sam moves even closer somehow, practically sitting on Dean’s lap, his beautiful face flushed at Dean’s words. He reaches out to touch his fingers over Dean’s hand, stroking over his knuckles and fighting within himself for words, Dean can tell. Dean knows his boy. “It’s just… I saw it last week at this store, and it was just… you. And I wanted you to have it.”

Dean lifts the ring out of the box and examines it, the ridges along the length of the bright silver. He slides it onto the ring finger of his right hand, amazed that it fits perfectly.

“Sammy, I,” he starts, his voice soft, cracking the slightest bit. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Do you like it?” Sam slips his fingers between Dean’s and tugs their hands into his lap, drawing Dean’s attention back over to him from the ring. Dean shakes his head in touched disbelief, giving the tiniest breath of laughter before leaning forward and catching Sam’s mouth in a kiss.

“Thank you,” he mumbles against his lips, their foreheads digging together, hands gripped so tight that the ring will leave an indentation on Sam’s palm. “It’s beautiful.”

“It opens beer bottles, too.” Sam grins against his mouth, and Dean has to tip his head back and laugh, lifting their joined hands to stare at the ring again. He looks past their hands at Sam, his smile one that he would only ever, ever give to this boy.

“You’re amazing, you know that?”

“You’re welcome.” A little drag of Sam’s nose over Dean’s and he’s pulling back, rustling the bag in his lap when he reaches inside. Dean’s face falls, his cheeks heating up.

“Oh, shit. Sam, what I got you is nothing in--”

“Shh. You’re ruining my moment.” Sam pulls the books out of the bag, his eyes lighting up at the sight of each title. He gasps, holding them up to let Dean see them, like Dean doesn’t know what they are. “These have both been on my reading wishlist for like, a year. Dean, how did you know?”

Dean grabs both bags and the box and moves them to the coffeetable, groaning and reaching up to rub hard at his eyes.

“Sam, you don’t have to--”

“Seriously, Dean! You don’t believe me?” Sam grabs the ratty messenger bag off the ground that he always carries with him, fishing around in it and pulling out a little notebook that he opens, flipping pages and finally stopping on one. He holds it up for Dean to see.

Dean’s eyes scan the long list of titles, some of the guilt easing out of his chest when he indeed sees both book titles right there on the list. He fidgets with his ring, eyes down as Sam returns the notebook to his bag and the bag to the floor.

“So. They’re okay?”

“They’re better than okay. They’re perfect. _You’re_ perfect. Thank you.” Sam’s hands are on his cheeks again, tipping his face up and they’re kissing, tongues sliding together and contented sighs rushing over cheeks.

They tuck back together after their mouths finally break apart, Sam resting against the long warmth of Dean’s body, _Candide_ cracked open, and he’s reading in the low light. Dean just rests back against the cushions and closes his eyes, hands stroking lazy over Sam’s familiar body. They’ll stay ‘til they get kicked out.

He’s in no hurry to leave, to end their perfect little Christmas.


End file.
